The following relates to the power consumption monitoring arts, power management arts, and related arts with application to power consumption monitoring and/or power management of devices that are typically left running and that have active and inactive modes, such as printers (including dedicated printers and also multifunction printers with additional capabilities, e.g. document scanning, facsimile transmit/receive, et cetera), scanners, facsimile machines, computers, and so forth.
In a typical office setting, office machines installed on a local area network (LAN, which may be a wired, wireless, or hybrid wired/wireless network) consume substantial electrical power. While some of this power is consumed during active operation (such as printing or document scanning operations), much of this power is consumed while the device is in its inactive mode(s). For example, the marking engine of a printer may include a fuser component that melts and fuses toner onto paper. The fuser operates at a high temperature, e.g. around 150° C. in some cases. To balance efficiency in terms of print job throughput versus electricity consumption, it is known to configure the device to transition from the active printing mode through one or more inactive mode that typically consume less power with each successively traversed inactive mode, until reaching a final “deepest” sleep mode that usually consumes the least amount of power. These inactive modes reduce power consumption by reducing electrical draw of components in an optimized way. For example, in the first inactive mode, the fuser may be kept at its operating temperature. In the next successive inactive mode the fuser temperature may be reduced to some intermediate value, and in the final inactive mode the fuser temperature may be allowed to fall to room temperature. In this way, the printer is kept “warm” during short periods of inactivity as may typically occur during the workday, and is allowed to go to a minimum power consumption mode if not used for an extended period, such as overnight. Other office devices such as scanners, as well as other devices such as computers, similarly are designed to have an active mode and one or more inactive modes in which higher power draw components may be partly or wholly inactivated or other measures taken to reduce power consumption. In some devices, the duration of each inactive mode in the sequence may be configurable to optimize power use. The various inactive modes may be variously named, e.g. “idle mode”, “sleep mode”, “power saving mode”, “stand-by”, et cetera, and if the device goes through a sequence of inactive modes each individual inactive mode may be differently named.
In a typical office setting, there may be a large number of office devices, and these devices are typically inactive most of the time, even during the workday. Optimizing the inactive modes of these devices thus presents an opportunity to improve office energy efficiency (whether a commercial office or a home office). This can be done manually if the inactive mode transition times are user-configurable parameters. Automated algorithms are also known for optimizing inactive mode transition times. See, e.g. Dance et al., U.S. Pub. No. 2011/0010571 A1 published Jan. 13, 2011.